The drugs are destined for Britain's streets. The guns go straight to the Taliban front line. The weapons on sale include machine guns, sniper rifles and anti-aircraft weapons like the ones used in the attempt to assassinate the Afghan President Hamid Karzai last weekend.
"We never sell the drugs for money," boasted one of the smugglers. "We exchange them for ammunition and Kalashnikovs."
The drugs come mostly from Helmand, where most of Britain's 7,800 troops are based. The opium grown there is turned into heroin at factories inside Afghanistan, sold into Tajikistan and smuggled to Europe. The guns are broken down into parts, smuggled back into Afghanistan and delivered to the Taliban. One kilogram of heroin can buy about 30 AK-47 assault rifles at the bazaar.
Nato claims the Taliban get between 40 and 60 per cent of their income from drugs. The smugglers' claims suggest the real cost could be far higher.
As the presidential race continues to heat up, we're going to hear more and more about the need for unity on major issues. I'm not unsympathetic to that idea, and certainly compromise is a vital part of politics. I like a vibrant marketplace of ideas, and I'm certainly competitive to the extent that I like to win (who doesn't?), but part of sharing a nation (or state or town or street) with other people is making trade-offs. On the other hand, this kind of give-and-take requires good faith on both sides. On some important issues, many conservatives are disingenuous about their positions -- especially when it comes to social conservatism, where too often some policy fig-leaf is used as a cover for the basic desire to punish for perceived social transgressions.
Details after the jump. Mark Kleinman writes about an amazing drug that can instantly reverse the effects of opiate overdoses. The drug is not addictive, cannot itself be overdosed on, costs less than $10 for an effective dose, and can be easily used by people with no medical training. Naturally, the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy opposes its distribution. The reason is, basically, that if heroin users died less, they'd have less incentive to quit. Seriously, that's the justification! Because so many junkies are super psyched about their addiction -- and would totally stop trying to quit if they thought it was less likely they might drop dead. And really, why should we help people -- by, y'know, allowing them to live -- who choose to do Bad Things when we can show them just how awful they are by helping bring about their death?
Right around the same time I read this, a report came out that women on the birth control pill are dramatically less likely to develop ovarian cancer -- even *decades after* they stop taking it. With the caveat that the pill isn't for everybody, for a variety of reasons, this is a great thing! To the extent that, I would imagine, it might be worth it for some women to take the pill simply for the anti-cancer benefit. But you're crazy if you think social conservatives will suddenly reverse course and promote the use of the pill, because it allows for -- horror of horrors -- sex without pregnancy, another Bad Thing. So some people are would rather women be twice as likely to develop ovarian cancer than even have the *possibility* of sex without pregnancy by virtue of the pill. Compassion, or punishment?
Compromise and unity does not equal progressives caving on these kinds of issues.
Remember when stopping opium production in Afghanistan was one of the numerous talking points? That didn't work out very well in Afghanistan and now it's moving into Iraq.
The speed with which farmers are turning to poppies is confirmed by the Iraqi news agency al-Malaf Press, which says that opium is now being produced around the towns of Khalis, Sa'adiya, Dain'ya and south of Baladruz, pointing out that these are all areas where al-Qa'ida is strong....
The growing and smuggling of opium will be difficult to stop in Iraq because much of the country is controlled by criminalised militias. American successes in Iraq over the past year have been largely through encouraging the development of a 70,000-strong Sunni Arab militia, many of whose members are former insurgents linked to protection rackets, kidnapping and crime. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, says that criminals have infiltrated its ranks.
If you are a poor farmer in Afghanistan (or for that matter, Laos, Myanmar, etc) and you can either grow crops that sell or crops that don't sell, what are you going to do? It doesn't even make sense to ask poverty-level farmers to do the "honorable" thing in the anti-drug crusade and go hungry. Being pragmatic has gone out of fashion in Washington over the last few years but at least Gordon Brown is giving it a go.
Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidise farmers in Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a wide-ranging drive to re-energise policy in the conflict the prime minister now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism.
The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted that the rise in opium production in the country means Britain "cannot just muddle along in the middle" and must come up with more imaginative ideas on opium eradication.
Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government is conducting joint research on suitable economic incentives with the World Bank.
A similar strategy was rolled out in northern Thailand in the late 1980's with reasonable success. Today the former poppy growing region is one of the nicest regions to visit in Thailand. The Thai royal family (the Princess Mother, in particular) took a leading role in the program that helped replace poppy fields with coffee and macadamia nuts. (Here is a great PDF download about about the program.) The program helped promote those products as well as other locally produced goods so instead of growing poppy (for heroin) they grow and produce other products to feed themselves. The end result are farmers who can grow products that are in demand that do not add to the drug trade problems. They also created one of the most spectacular public gardens in the world, The Mae Fah Luang Garden.
This is an obvious situation where pragmatism will produce greater results compared to the moralizing sledgehammer approach that has been failing year after year in Afghanistan.
UPDATE: Check out the Mae Fah Luang Garden photos on Flickr. What a stunning garden and orchids to die for.
Man, this good Southern Baptist preacher (and Christian radio DJ) from Johnson City, TN was getting busy!
The minister of a Baptist church has been charged with indecent exposure and driving under the influence, and police officers say he propositioned them.
Tommy Tester, 58, of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly urinating in front of children at a car wash, police said. Police also said Tester offered to perform oral sex on officers who were sent to the scene.
Authorities identified Tester as the minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol and an employee of Christian radio station WZAP-AM in Bristol.
Bonus! WGAL reports that police found an open bottle of vodka and empty oxycodone prescription bottle in Tester's car.
Who could forget those early days, when the Bush administration patted itself on the back, telling anyone who would listen that besides shutting down the Taliban and catching bin Laden, the Taliban business of growing and selling opium would be shut down and women would all be free? Those were the days when talk was cheap, ideas were big and the media preached every word of Dear Leader. Fast-forward a few years and the realities on the ground are every so slightly different. Afghanistan gets worse by the day.
In 2006, Afghanistan accounted for 92 percent of global illicit opium production, up from 70 percent in 2000 and 52 percent a decade earlier. The higher yields in Afghanistan brought global opium production to a record high of nearly 7,300 tons last year, a 43 percent increase over 2005.
The area under opium poppy cultivation in the country has also expanded, from nearly 257,000 acres in 2005 to more than 407,000 acres in 2006 — an increase of about 59 percent.
"This is the largest area under opium poppy cultivation ever recorded in Afghanistan," the report said, noting that two-thirds of cultivation was concentrated in the country's south.
Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, have served as key advisors for the last five years to the pharmaceutical company that pled guilty today to charges it misled doctors and patients about the addiction risks of the powerful narcotic painkiller OxyContin.
Federal officials say the company, Purdue Frederick, helped to trigger a nationwide epidemic of addiction to the time-release painkiller by failing to give early warnings that it could be abused.
Prosecutors say "in the process scores died."
Drug Enforcement Administration officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com Giuliani personally met with the head of the DEA when the DEA's drug diversion office began a criminal investigation into the company.
According to the book "Painkiller," by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, both Giuliani and his then-partner Bernard Kerik "were in direct contact with Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of DEA."
Hutchinson told the Blotter on ABCNews.com today that Giuliani asked for a meeting, "and we gave him a meeting." Hutchinson says he was aware the company was under investigation at the time, and "any time a company is under investigation I like to give them a chance to make their case."
Kerik told New York Magazine at the time that Giuliani had raised $15,000 in donations for a "traveling museum operated by the DEA."
Some officials told ABC News there were questions inside the agency of whether the donations were an attempt to influence the DEA.
